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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

Facebook Earnings Preview: Will Mobile Ads Finally Pay Off?

Facebook is one of a number of tech companies set to announce its second-quarter financial results this week, and its earnings are expected to be among the most closely scrutinized as its mobile strategy takes shape. The company will host a conference calls at 2pm PT on Wednesday when it will announce its results, with the proceedings set to be broadcast live on the Facebook Investor Relations website.

With regards to its mobile efforts, Facebook’s mobile ad revenues and its mobile-user numbers will both be under the spotlight, with several analysts predicting that this push will help drive double-digit revenues and earnings growth. There’s every reason to be confident – during its first quarter report, Facebook posted $1.458 billion in revenues, an increase of $1.06 billion from the year before, with earnings per share pegged at $0.12. At that time, Facebook discussed ways in which it was trying to hone its advertising techniques to make them more profitable, highlighting new methods of targeting and partner categories.

Newsfeed Ads Make a Splash

All the evidence points towards Facebook’s new advertising strategies having a positive impact. Last weekend, Adobe’s research division posted a report highlighting the effectiveness of the social media giant’s new display advertising campaign, and the results were hugely encouraging from the investor’s perspective.

Adobe’s report cites the significant impact of Facebook’s desktop newsfeed ads, those so-called ‘sponsored stories’, which – although irritating for some – have achieved click-through rates (CTR) 14 times greater than its standard right-hand side (RHS) ads. Even more encouraging however is the success of its newsfeed ads on mobile, which achieved a CTR that’s 28 times better than RHS ads, with the cost-per-click also being 42% lower. All this was achieved despite the daily impression frequency for newsfeed ads being considerably lower – by 62% on desktop and 66% on mobile – which translates to a lot more bang for advertiser’s bucks. Adobe calculates that altogether, the CTR advantage of newsfeed ads versus RHS ads is five times greater on desktop, and eight times greater on mobile.

It remains to be seen if these new ads will translate into greater profits. Inside Facebook says that we probably won’t see their true impact until Facebook posts its third quarter results later this year, but in any case it would be a big surprise if its results fell short of analysts’ expectations.

Facebook Premium Anyone?

Even if Facebook’s new ad strategy does somehow fail to translate into more $$$s, the company could have further tricks up its sleeve, perhaps by offering users a chance to pay to avoid seeing those unsightly ads. Not that Facebook has even hinted at such an idea, rather the suggestion comes from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, who wrote on the free blogging platform Medium that though he’s finally fallen in love with the social media network, he’d gladly pay to see the back of those sponsored stories.

According to Stone, Facebook would do well to offer people the choice of paying $10 a month to get rid of those pesky ads, which in many cases totally suck:

“In general, the ads on Facebook don’t seem particularly useful or engaging. However, ads on the service are universally tolerated because that’s what makes Facebook free and free is nice. They could offer Facebook Premium. For $10 a month, people who really love Facebook (and can afford it), could see no ads. Maybe some special features too. If 10 percent of Facebook signed up, that’s $1B a month in revenue. Not too shabby.”

Admittedly it’s not really the most original idea, but it’s one that would almost certainly work. After all, pretty much every mobile phone app does something similar – offering ad-free paid versions with better features – and there’s a precedent of sorts with Apple rumored to be lining up its own premium, ad-free TV offering.

About Mike Wheatley

Mike Wheatley is a senior staff writer at SiliconANGLE. He loves to write about Big Data and the Internet of Things, and explore how these technologies are evolving and helping businesses to become more agile.
Before joining SiliconANGLE, Mike was an editor at Argophilia Travel News, an occassional contributer to The Epoch Times, and has also dabbled in SEO and social media marketing. He usually bases himself in Bangkok, Thailand, though he can often be found roaming through the jungles or chilling on a beach.
Got a news story or tip? Email Mike@SiliconANGLE.com.